News Tagged ‘GAO’

New Orleans is ‘Ground Zero’ of national wage theft epidemic

katrina 100x100Hurricane Katrina, a powerful storm surge, and a system of inadequate levies teamed up in 2005 to create an unprecedented level of disaster in the United States. In the wake that followed, New Orleans (along with many other coastal communities in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama) resembled a sea of destruction. New Orleans relied heavily on day laborers to clean up, repair, and rebuild. Sadly, however, recent surveys found that 80% of the Hispanic workers had been cheated out of compensation.

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Solis works to revamp and empower Wage and Hour Division

hilda solis1 100x100The Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division, under which the Fair Labor Standards Act came into existence in 1938 as part of a nationwide effort to protect working class citizens from corporate exploitation and abuse, may be on the mend after an long era of being little more than a bureaucratic entity.

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Department of Labor fails to uphold and enforce FLSA regulations

wage workers 2 100x100If you’re a wage worker and your employer is violating the Federal Labor Standards Act (FLSA) by paying you less than minimum wage, denying you , or misclassifying you as a manager or independent contractor, don’t go running to the Department of Labor () for help anytime soon. According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the ’s Wage and Hour Division (WHD) is incompetent. What’s worse, the latest report, released on March 29, represents the third time in less than a year that the GAO has found the Wage and Hour Division’s performance a failure when it came to enforcing FLSA regulations and helping the people it was designed to serve.

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